Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [15]
Usually those words were enough. But certain signals alerted me that it was a bad idea to press any point. We all took my mother seriously. I knew that the appropriate response was to stop, at least for the moment. She often guided me to the next activity: “Let’s go outside and get the eggs.” Or the always welcomed “Are you ready for some lunch?” She would indulge me enough to try to distract me with food—a baked sweet potato or sardines and crackers. Though I remember enjoying these foods with my mother, I don’t think I ever really enjoyed the taste of them. We enjoyed mostly the communion of that time, so much so that I would never complain about the flavors.
I enjoyed a luxury shared by none of my other siblings. That was time alone with my mother. For the four years between the time when my youngest sibling, JoAnn, started school and the time I entered the first grade, my mother and I were nearly constant companions. Similarly, when JoAnn went away to college and I was in high school, my mother and I spent the summers together. And outside of her farm responsibility, I had her constant attention. By that time Mama had been raising children for thirty years, and knowing that I was the last child she would raise to adulthood, she seemed to take extra care with me. I never believed that she favored me, though my siblings might disagree. Certainly, she may have hung on to me a little longer. But she never excused me from discipline or the work that had to be done on the farm.
My favorite meals were the ones that my mother cooked for the family when I was a child. Food and physical warmth were two things that Mama lavished upon her family. She always assumed that her children were as hungry or as easily chilled as she. A sudden unexpected drop in the temperature (common in Oklahoma) during a spring day never caught us off guard. We were prepared with sweaters just in case. Each winter morning she rose before the rest of us to build a blazing fire in our wood-burning stove. And my mother did nearly all of the cooking. Meals of biscuits or corn bread, rice or fried potatoes, stew, pork chops or fried chicken, and greens were her specialties.
Summer and winter, my mother was invariably the first to rise in the household. In summer with no fire to attend to, she began the day by starting the preparation for breakfast. The sound of rattling pots was our alarm clock, followed shortly by the sound of my father sharpening the hoes for the day’s work in the fields. “You all get up, now. It’s almost seven,” she cried out at 6:35. Following breakfast my mother gathered us and we trekked to whatever field we were working, often on foot. (My father worked with the tractor and looked after the cattle.) Midday, we broke. My mother prepared the noon meal. We returned to often oppressive heat of the cotton or peanut patch for an afternoon of work. We ate a light meal at about sunset, washed up, and shortly thereafter fell into bed exhausted. My mother and her children kept this routine every summer until only I and my mother were left to do the “chopping.”
My mother regularly coordinated meals, field work, and home chores. In any given year, the household included as many as eight of the thirteen children. When my parents learned that an elderly man once married to my father’s aunt had again been widowed, they brought him into the household. At the age of four, I could not understand how Charley Arvier, who spoke a kind of Cajun French and broken English with a Louisiana accent, was related to me. Yet we called him Uncle Charley, and he lived